5 Situations Where Hiring an SEO Expert is a Must

7 min read

With the ever-changing world of digital marketing and digital advertising, many are claiming that they’ve reached a point where search engine optimization (SEO) is seen as “dead” or “common knowledge.” As a result, these businesses don’t go through the effort of sourcing or hiring quality in-house SEO experts, consultants or agencies. That being said, there are still times where people should definitely hire an SEO expert. Regardless of how you decide to get SEO advice, the important thing is that you gain the expertise and experience of someone who can advise you correctly at a critical point of your business.

So what exactly are the five situations we are referring to? You can read about them below:

When You Launch a New Website

Whether you’re making your first venture into establishing your online presence or whether your old site has performance or user experience (UX) issues, the launch of a new website is a big deal – it could completely change your traffic (in a good or bad way).

A small redesign may not be a big issue but when you are alter categories & tags, swapping your content management system (CMS), create new pages or make any other substantial changes, you could be headed towards trouble. In this situation, you need the help of an SEO expert to do the following:

As you can see, there are a variety of things that need to happen from an SEO perspective – none of which you would want to leave on its own, hoping for things to work out and none of which you would want to just wing. An SEO expert can prove to be invaluable at this stage.

When You First Start Investing Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’re new to the field of digital marketing, an SEO expert can help you go a long way. Previously, an SEO expert’s job was easy – create title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 titles. Today, it is a lot more complicated as the digital marketing world has evolved and so has SEO. Now there appears to be more rules to the game. Despite many business owners having a grasp on basic SEO concepts, there are much more that are surfacing such as:

Optimizing the Robots.txt file

Integrating Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools

Putting noindex tags in place

Creating a linkbuilding plan

These are part of a standard SEO tasklists but appear to be far less familiar to business owners and developers . That’s just the technical stuff too. The digital marketing industry today involves even more advanced forms of optimization such as mobile SEO and App Store optimization (where applicable of course). As part of the technical work, you don’t want to miss anything in the process and hiring an SEO expert can prove to be invaluable at this stage as well.

When Google Slaps Your Website with a Good Ol’ Penalty

Google periodically continues to unleash manual and algorithmic penalties that are swift and heavy. The fact that Google still rules the search world forces many businesses (including yours) to adapt to its demands. If you’ve done some research on linkbuilding techniques, chances are you’ve found a few tips and tricks. What the tips and tricks don’t tell you is that some of them are considered to be black hat, which puts you at a huge risk for penalty.

If and when the manual penalty comes, the implications could become a huge problem. If your company relies on online traffic for revenue, these implications can be devastating. Furthermore, recovering from a penalty requires enormous amounts of time and effort. You can do the research and try and go about it alone but your efforts may either 1) take forever or 2) be ineffective. If you’re serious about resolving the issue, you’re likely better off hiring an SEO expert to resolve the matter, be transparent about all of the efforts involved and help provide expectations as to when things may be fixed – all of which are vital.

When You’re About to Launch a Content Marketing Campaign

Many digital marketing agencies and marketers are claiming “content is king.” Content isn’t the end to all means but it does remain quite important. Companies of all shapes, sizes and industries are engaging in content marketing. That being said, content marketing efforts aren’t always as effective as they can be. Why exactly is that?

Because many companies don’t integrate SEO best practices into their content marketing campaign.

Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly if you didn’t know), content marketing and search engine optimization both overlap one another quite often. That being said, that doesn’t mean they are the same thing. Hiring a content marketing expert doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the SEO value you need from those efforts. This isn’t to say that SEO and content marketing are in conflict as they are most definitely not. Below are some ways that SEO overlaps with content marketing:

Ensuring that all technical SEO features are in place for your content marketing efforts.

A quick summary of what the main point is: your content marketing efforts need to be integrated with SEO. If you begin your content marketing campaign, don’t do so unless you have the advice and expertise of someone who can help you with the ins and outs otherwise you may just be wasting your time.

When You’re a Local Business Looking to Take Advantage of Local Search Results

If you’re a local business, you need to take advantage of local SEO. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. The issue as a whole gets even more complicated when you factor in the fact that local SEO is constantly changing rules and regulations to abide by. Furthermore, few local business owners (especially those who own small businesses) have the time to implement all the local SEO best practices on their own. To perform local SEO and to do it right, you need to spend a level of time and effort that few business owners can afford.

The perfect example of how complicated local SEO can get would be to take a look at creating local citations. If you sign up with the wrong directories or in the wrong places, you could potentially harm your SEO results. Even if you do it the right way, it’s not always easy because you’ll end up with the mind-numbing task of filling out forms repeatedly. Furthermore, what if your business changes names, addresses or phone numbers? You’ll be introduced to a whole new layer of complexity of this was to happen.

The issue as a whole showcases the importance of hiring a local SEO expert. Local businesses will struggle to stay in the sights of their customers without proper search engine optimization. With the growing number of mobile searchers, your business as a whole could either sink or float based on the success of your local SEO efforts (depending on the business industry and model of course). Hiring an experienced and capable local SEO expert is usually the best solution to take in this scenario.

The Bottom Line

Unless you have a serious amount of time and are willing to roll up your sleeves and get down and dirty, you may not be cut out to tackle all of the SEO needs your business probably requires. Eventually there may be a day where we don’t need to focus so much on SEO or hire an SEO expert but as of right now, we’re not quite there yet. Until that day comes by, you may want to seek some help for SEO regarding your business. It won’t just help your business; it could potentially make or break it.

I like to call myself the 'cool guy' in the office, even though all of my work is virtual. If internet marketing is the jam of business these days, I am the nutella.

7 min read

With the ever-changing world of digital marketing and digital advertising, many are claiming that they’ve reached a point where search engine optimization (SEO) is seen as “dead” or “common knowledge.” As a result, these businesses don’t go through the effort of sourcing or hiring quality in-house SEO experts, consultants or agencies. That being said, there are still times where people should definitely hire an SEO expert. Regardless of how you decide to get SEO advice, the important thing is that you gain the expertise and experience of someone who can advise you correctly at a critical point of your business.

So what exactly are the five situations we are referring to? You can read about them below:

When You Launch a New Website

Whether you’re making your first venture into establishing your online presence or whether your old site has performance or user experience (UX) issues, the launch of a new website is a big deal – it could completely change your traffic (in a good or bad way).

A small redesign may not be a big issue but when you are alter categories & tags, swapping your content management system (CMS), create new pages or make any other substantial changes, you could be headed towards trouble. In this situation, you need the help of an SEO expert to do the following:

As you can see, there are a variety of things that need to happen from an SEO perspective – none of which you would want to leave on its own, hoping for things to work out and none of which you would want to just wing. An SEO expert can prove to be invaluable at this stage.

When You First Start Investing Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’re new to the field of digital marketing, an SEO expert can help you go a long way. Previously, an SEO expert’s job was easy – create title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 titles. Today, it is a lot more complicated as the digital marketing world has evolved and so has SEO. Now there appears to be more rules to the game. Despite many business owners having a grasp on basic SEO concepts, there are much more that are surfacing such as:

Optimizing the Robots.txt file

Integrating Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools

Putting noindex tags in place

Creating a linkbuilding plan

These are part of a standard SEO tasklists but appear to be far less familiar to business owners and developers . That’s just the technical stuff too. The digital marketing industry today involves even more advanced forms of optimization such as mobile SEO and App Store optimization (where applicable of course). As part of the technical work, you don’t want to miss anything in the process and hiring an SEO expert can prove to be invaluable at this stage as well.

When Google Slaps Your Website with a Good Ol’ Penalty

Google periodically continues to unleash manual and algorithmic penalties that are swift and heavy. The fact that Google still rules the search world forces many businesses (including yours) to adapt to its demands. If you’ve done some research on linkbuilding techniques, chances are you’ve found a few tips and tricks. What the tips and tricks don’t tell you is that some of them are considered to be black hat, which puts you at a huge risk for penalty.

If and when the manual penalty comes, the implications could become a huge problem. If your company relies on online traffic for revenue, these implications can be devastating. Furthermore, recovering from a penalty requires enormous amounts of time and effort. You can do the research and try and go about it alone but your efforts may either 1) take forever or 2) be ineffective. If you’re serious about resolving the issue, you’re likely better off hiring an SEO expert to resolve the matter, be transparent about all of the efforts involved and help provide expectations as to when things may be fixed – all of which are vital.

When You’re About to Launch a Content Marketing Campaign

Many digital marketing agencies and marketers are claiming “content is king.” Content isn’t the end to all means but it does remain quite important. Companies of all shapes, sizes and industries are engaging in content marketing. That being said, content marketing efforts aren’t always as effective as they can be. Why exactly is that?

Because many companies don’t integrate SEO best practices into their content marketing campaign.

Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly if you didn’t know), content marketing and search engine optimization both overlap one another quite often. That being said, that doesn’t mean they are the same thing. Hiring a content marketing expert doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the SEO value you need from those efforts. This isn’t to say that SEO and content marketing are in conflict as they are most definitely not. Below are some ways that SEO overlaps with content marketing:

Ensuring that all technical SEO features are in place for your content marketing efforts.

A quick summary of what the main point is: your content marketing efforts need to be integrated with SEO. If you begin your content marketing campaign, don’t do so unless you have the advice and expertise of someone who can help you with the ins and outs otherwise you may just be wasting your time.

When You’re a Local Business Looking to Take Advantage of Local Search Results

If you’re a local business, you need to take advantage of local SEO. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. The issue as a whole gets even more complicated when you factor in the fact that local SEO is constantly changing rules and regulations to abide by. Furthermore, few local business owners (especially those who own small businesses) have the time to implement all the local SEO best practices on their own. To perform local SEO and to do it right, you need to spend a level of time and effort that few business owners can afford.

The perfect example of how complicated local SEO can get would be to take a look at creating local citations. If you sign up with the wrong directories or in the wrong places, you could potentially harm your SEO results. Even if you do it the right way, it’s not always easy because you’ll end up with the mind-numbing task of filling out forms repeatedly. Furthermore, what if your business changes names, addresses or phone numbers? You’ll be introduced to a whole new layer of complexity of this was to happen.

The issue as a whole showcases the importance of hiring a local SEO expert. Local businesses will struggle to stay in the sights of their customers without proper search engine optimization. With the growing number of mobile searchers, your business as a whole could either sink or float based on the success of your local SEO efforts (depending on the business industry and model of course). Hiring an experienced and capable local SEO expert is usually the best solution to take in this scenario.

The Bottom Line

Unless you have a serious amount of time and are willing to roll up your sleeves and get down and dirty, you may not be cut out to tackle all of the SEO needs your business probably requires. Eventually there may be a day where we don’t need to focus so much on SEO or hire an SEO expert but as of right now, we’re not quite there yet. Until that day comes by, you may want to seek some help for SEO regarding your business. It won’t just help your business; it could potentially make or break it.

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